Know thy self

I came across this blog post and found it very insightful.

I could relate myself to the author of this post.

A few points that I found interesting. [verbatim from the post]:

-
Beware the traps of justification and attribution when thinking about your life. Many people justify past decisions because they want them to make sense and feel better.

^-- This is what I have been doing the past one year! Fooling myself.

Yes, most clouds have silver linings. But sometimes getting hit in the head with a shovel is just getting hit in the head with a shovel. It’s not fun, there’s not much educational value, and your life really is better without it.

-
I really don't know what I want.
The author gives simple and effective tips to understand what you want:
1. A feel good list <-- In this, you note down the events that made you feel good. eg: understanding the paper on semantic search. eg: Explaining Sudhir on why I feel that semantic search would be better than textual search. eg: Telling a colleague that google patent search would be better than delphion.
eg: Helping a colleague finding a solution to the problem he was facing.


2. An ideas list <-- In this you note down the ideas that come to your mind. The author mentioned sometimes he gets a great idea in the sleep and he just gets up and notes that idea down. This happened to me a couple of times :). 3. Finally, get external inputs. Understand your personality and get inspired. I took up this personality test on: and found that : I was and ENJF http://typelogic.com/enfj.html

Extraverted	Intuitive	Feeling	Judging
Strength of the preferences %
33	38	12	11

I'd like to read it again.
In short, it says that people like me like to find solutions, look for greener pastures, help others and are pedagogues of humanity.
That is true I believe, but it is for the people around me to tell me that.

Here is something from a test that I took up previously.


More good talk. From the same blog:


This talk is good:

Richard St. John: Secrets of success in 8 words, 3 minutes

• Do what you love: Passion
• Determination: Hard work, focus, push yourself, get good in one thing
  
• Make something useful: Ideas, serve others
• Keep your chin up: Persist

I need to look at the highlighted points

One needs to persist in the face of failure and other CRAP:

• Criticism
• Rejection
• Jerks (or another word for a non-nice person)
• Pressure

Personality development for Kids

Here is something I wrote on a piece of paper.. This was an effort for the kids of SEEK, VISHWAS, Bangalore. A part of it has been implemented

Syntactic to Semantic Web. The search engine that "Understands" what you want!

I have been looking for current work on text mining, knowledge representation/extraction from unstructured data. I have bookmarked

I found this paper particularly interesting:
"Knowledge Discovery from Semi-Structured Data for Conceptual Organization"


The authors talk about

• creating a concept map (a graph of co-occurring [in other terms, related] concepts [noun phrases]) from a corpus,
• then extracting cliques of a particular concept [using a topological sort],
• and then assigning the documents to that particular clique

What you get a the end is the mapping of a document to concepts. In short, what are the noun phrases that describe the document.
These noun phrases may not always contain all the noun phrases that occur in the document [eg. red soil, which may have occurred in one of the documents containing the concept "rose", but it did not co-occur in any other document containing "rose"]
On the other hand, these noun phrases may include some concepts which were not obvious from that particular document [eg. a document containing "school kids" may not contain the concept "chocolate", but these two concepts have co-occurred in a significant number of documents in the corpus]..

I liked the paper, the concept is very similar to what we do in real life.
We have concepts stored inside our brain [connection between neurons?]. To extract the concept map stored in your brain, you just need to think about all the things that come to your mind when you think about a concept say "s e x".
When ever we come across something new (a new concept), we just associate it to an already existing concept map in our brain. These concepts are in turn linked to information about them (related documents?)

We can even take this a step ahead by assigning weights to the edges [based upon how frequently they co-occur, label the edges[and nodes] with all possible verbs that connect them ]

btw, the authors the Stanford Parser to extract the noun phrases.

you can try it online here.
Moving from syntactic to semantic.. arent we?